If you’ve got time today (it takes 15 minutes or longer to read), read this essay on the liberal biases in academia today and its negative implications, by Roger Kimball, which appears in the OpinionJournal.com.
It’s called Retaking the Universities – A battle plan.
There’s too many passages that are quote-worthy so I’ll just quote the opener. As usual, you can draw comparisons to the situation in Canada only add more entrenched liberalism—much of it mandated by liberal laws and policies and state-run liberal media—into the mix.
The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelet without breaking eggs.
As with anything to which the word “Marxist” applies, there are at least 87 things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated “contradiction” to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise.
Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill’s invitation to speak at Hamilton College earlier this year. The spectacle of a highly paid academic with a fabricated background comparing the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi bureaucrat was too much. Mr. Churchill’s fellow academics endeavored—they are still endeavoring—to rally round. But the public wasn’t buying it. Such episodes, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in National Review recently, were like “a torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath”
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